SCIENTIFIC MEETING – “Buried in the Future Which Has Not Happened” – Non-linear Time, ‘Non-logic’ and the Ultimate Reality of the Session

Presenter: Avner Bergstein MA, FIPA

Saturday, April 29, 2023: 9:00 am – 11:00 am

TPS Scientific Meeting: Open to Members, Affiliates/Guests, TIP Candidates, and ATPPP Trainees Only

** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY – Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting. Preregistration is required.

Facilitating one’s ability for truthfully apprehending reality is at the heart of psychoanalytic work. Clinically, Bion repeatedly underscores the close observation of the transformation of the emotional experience in the immediacy of the here and now of the session, as a way of approaching an infinitely complex and often unthinkable reality, and for expanding the individual’s capacity for tolerating the pain and frustration entailed in this encounter.

Bion’s radical contribution to psychoanalysis, and its affinity with contemporary insights from Quantum Theory, extricates us from a hallucinatory grasp on the past, elaborating the capacity to tolerate the unknown and unknowable infinite stream towards the future. Hence, the work of analysis, as depicted in this paper, is not only revealing unconscious thoughts buried in the past, but also cultivating a psychically alive mind able to create and generate new thoughts, oriented toward the future and the unknown. In this thinking, the analyst aims not so much at facilitating the transformation of unconscious into conscious, but rather, as Bion suggests, facilitating the dialectical, paradoxical, and often contradictory movement between finite and infinite, releasing the individual, patient and analyst, from a rigidified imprisonment in a hallucinatory reality.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Elaborate the fundamental conception of unconscious psychic truth, reality in transit and O.
2. Reflect on the clinical implications of the notion of unrepressed unconscious experience.
3. Elaborate the notion of working in the immediacy of the here and now of the psychoanalytic session.

Avner Bergstein MA, FIPA

Avner Bergstein MA, FIPA is a training and supervising psychoanalyst and faculty member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He works in private practice with adults, adolescents and children and has worked for several years at a kindergarten for children with autism. He has authored numerous papers elaborating on the clinical implications of the writings of Bion and Meltzer and his papers are translated into many languages. He is author of the book Bion and Meltzer’s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life: Beyond the Spectrum in Psychoanalysis. He conducts reading seminars internationally focusing on the writings of these two authors. He is also the recipient of the IPA 2021 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award.